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Governor should stymie parole board's recommendation

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Growing up in Southern California from the mid-1950s, my awareness of the world around me began to take shape during the tumult of the ’60s — a sociological rather than calendrical designation for a period from Nov. 22, 1963, to Aug. 9, 1974.

The first of those dates marks the assassination of the nation’s 35th president and the second marks the resignation of the nation’s 37th president. In between, the country’s social and political fabrics were rent in many ways — more assassinations, urban race riots, violent student demonstrations against an unpopular war, the rise (and fall) of the counterculture.

On Aug. 9, 1969, we all woke up to news that in many ways was a natural outgrowth of the massive changes under way in the country.

A mass murder had been discovered at a home in LA’s Benedict Canyon neighborhood. Five people were dead — slaughtered — including an eight-months-pregnant Hollywood starlet named Sharon Tate, whose husband, Polish movie director Roman Polanski, was away from home at the time.

The next night, a supermarket executive, Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, were killed in a similarly grisly fashion.

By Dec. 1, 1969, Charles Manson and members of his so-called family, a small cult of mostly young followers bound by their infatuation for Manson and/or cowed by his threats of violence, had been rounded up and charged in the killings.

Thirteen months later, after a six-month trial that became a performance venue for Manson, his co-defendants and many of his followers outside the courtroom, all the defendants were found guilty of multiple murders.

The following April, they were sentenced to death, but those sentences were commuted to life in prison when the state’s Supreme Court abolished the death penalty in February 1972.

Why this recap of a heinous 43-year-old crime? Because the state’s parole board has recommended to Gov. Jerry Brown that Bruce Davis, now 69, often called Manson’s right-hand man, be freed from prison after 40 years behind bars.

Davis was not among the “family” members who participated in the Tate-LaBianca murders, but he was convicted in the deaths of musician Gary Hinman, who resisted a shakedown by Manson, and former movie stuntman Donald “Shorty” Shea, who had worked at a ranch in Chatsworth, where Manson and his followers had holed up for a time.

Because the law in 1972 did not provide for a sentence of life without the possibility of parole, the commutation of the death sentences of Manson and his followers made all of them eligible for parole. So far, none has been freed.

Davis is the first to be recommended for release. The parole board cited his “positive adjustment, record of no recent disciplinary problems, and for successfully completing academic and vocational education and self-help programs.”

He is now an ordained minister with correspondence-school master’s degrees in religion and philosophy.

All of that doesn’t change the facts of the cases in which Davis was involved, directly and peripherally. He participated in individual and mass murders. In a different penal environment, he might have already died by execution.

Criminal punishment, according to long-held legal doctrine, should satisfy at least one if not more of five conditions:

1. It should prevent the criminal from committing other crimes while imprisoned or, in the event of execution, from ever again committing a crime.

2. It should be sufficient to deter others from committing the crime for which the punishment was meted out.

3. It should require the convict to make some restitution to those he or she has harmed.

4. It should serve as societal retribution for the harm the felon caused.

5. It should serve to rehabilitate the criminal, making him or her better for the experience of the punishment.

Davis has not killed in the 40 years he’s been imprisoned. Society continues to have its retribution for the murders of Hinman and Shea. And it appears that at least a modicum of rehabilitation has occurred.

Whether or not locking Davis up for 40 years has deterred anyone else from committing murder is hard to say.

Because lives were taken — irreparably — civil society has its right to see to it that, at least under the law at the time that Davis was sentenced, he “forfeit” his “life” — his freedom — in order to make restitution for the lives of Hinman and Shea.

Governor Brown should take a long, hard look at the parole board’s recommendation and then he should deny the parole. Davis earned his stay behind bars by his willful actions of four decades ago. He should be required to continue collecting on those earnings.

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